Carbon-Based Primitive
by razostory
Summary: Monsters are coming out of the ocean and destroying the world. Two irascible scientists are trying to stop them. (Pacific Rim fusion, non-wizarding. Tomione.)
1. Chapter 1

"Tom."

He made an irritated, interrogative noise. Which was a sort of progress. The charming _give me your grant money_ glandhanding soap-slick Poor Orphan Boy Made Good layer had not survived the close quarters of the laboratory. What was underneath communicated in a variety of imperious demands, grunts, passionate screeds, and insults that peeled back skin like a scalpel. This sort of grunt passed for _yes Hermione, brilliant and patient woman, better lab partner than I deserve_?

"You had pilot training," she started.

"Anyone can punch things. It was a waste of my talents."

"Let me finish a sentence," she said.

"Could I stop you?" he said. There was a nasty little undertow to his voice now, but the world was being torn apart by monsters, and Hermione had more things to worry about than a distressingly tall raised by wolves biologist and his bone saws.

"As I was saying," she said. "You were trained as a pilot. In your professional opinion–"

"Oh, well, now." He hacked at something on his table. There was a bright blue fountain of liquid that barely missed the splashguard over his face, and he gave the kaiju innards his small, personal, vicious little smile. "My consulting rates, per hour, are–"

"Shut up, Tom, for the love of God." Her own work in interdimensional physics was irritatingly free of things to stab and emphasize her feelings. She vengefully chewed the end of a pen instead. "I want to know if you think I could be a pilot."

"Absolutely not," Tom said promptly.

"Excuse me–"

"You can't even share the desk. Anyone unfortunate enough to end up in your head would go mad in short order."

"You're projecting," she said frostily. "My brain is perfectly… hospitable." A pause. "And it's _my desk_."

At that, he deigned to look up at her. No one–by now the thought was as weary as it was resentful–should look like that with a knife in their hand, with stinking blue alien blood splashed across their labcoat and drying tacky on their gloves. But that was Tom Riddle, first class brain, cut glass face, and a personality scraped off the bottom of a fridge.

"You're serious," he said, and something in the bleeding mess under his fine hands broke audibly. Under the clear plastic splashguard, his jaw grew visibly tight. "Hermione. No."

"No, you don't think I could?" she said. "Because you should know by now you don't tell me what I can and can't do."

"Are you doing this to bother me?" Tom said. "Because you aren't this stupid."

"I don't see what's stupid about it."

"You _invented_ your specialty," he snarled, in much the same tone as _you shat on the rug_. "And now you want to go get yourself killed. Who's supposed to replace you? _Nott_?" Tom threw down his knife and started stripping off his gloves with harsh, jerky movements.

"Books, and cleverness. There's more important–"

"Like fuck there is."

Hermione blinked, startled. Tom was frequently irritable, now he knew being charming just annoyed her and being threatened enraged her, but he never swore. "Why, Tom. I didn't know you cared."

His jaw worked. He opened his mouth to say something undoubtedly cutting, then clamped it shut again. Calm visibly spread over him, smoothing out his forehead and easing the angry line of his mouth.

"No Marshall would ever let you in a jaeger," he said. "Not even Dumbledore would take that chance. So this conversation is pointless." He didn't move to put his gloves back on, though. In fact, he took off the splashguard, and kept his eyes on her. In that little corner of herself that had gone stupid and soft and fanciful over Lockhart, sometimes she thought of his eyes as devouring. They were a color that, ten years ago, might have been called gas fire: now that glowing, burning blue belonged to something else.

There was probably something a little wrong with her, that Tom could look at her like she was a specimen flayed on the table and it only felt–thrilling.

Hermione tugged her mind back to the very real work of preventing the apocalypse.

"I could convince him," she said. "If you helped me."

"Which I would never do," he said. "What's going on? Why are you suddenly suicidal?"

"I have an idea about how to close the breach," Hermione said. "But I have to be in the jaeger."

* * *

The explanation was nonsense.

Oh, it sounded good, the way she rambled and scrawled lengthy equations across her ludicrously huge chalkboard, gesticulating fit to fall off her stepstool. It sounded brilliant, Tom conceded, as he stood over his wholly forgotten dissection. Nonsense all the same.

It had to be. There was no way a single person, one single wholly untrained person, could be so important, could do something a good program couldn't. There was absolutely no way the explanation wasn't bullshit, and later, when his vision was not red-edged with fury, he would look over her equations and find the flaw.

For now–

"Fine," he said, clipping off the end of her interminable speech. "But if you want my help, you're getting my help."

Hermione gave him a suspicious squint. He smiled. "You'll practice with _me_ ," he said. "You'll drift with _me_."

Her flinch was barely visible, but he had been looking for it.

"You," she said. Flat. Disbelieving.

Tom picked up a pair of crucible tongs and threw them at her head.

Hermione smacked them out of the air without breaking eye contact. He smirked.

"How do I take my coffee, Hermione?"

"Thrown in your face by someone _completely out of patience_ ," she said.

"Humor me."

"I don't know–tepid, after being forgotten for hours–" Tom had rounded the table while she spoke. He caught up her cane in one hand, and offered her his other hand to climb down. She took it. "–and almost certainly contaminated with kaiju blood. If you put anything in it it's probably more coffee."

Hermione reached for the cane, which he held away, and she leaned on him as he supported her over to their desk. He could have stopped offering this months ago, when Medical had finally gotten her a cane that was the right length, but he hadn't, and somehow Hermione had never said a word about it. She sat down carefully, with a sigh and a slight wince, one that had her looking guiltily up at Tom. Tom raised his eyebrows.

"I do my stretches."

"You little liar. Top left drawer."

Hermione pulled out a bottle of painkillers and dry-swallowed one, before sticking her hand out for the cane. Tom didn't hand it over. Her eyes narrowed.

"You need to sit. Let me get it."

"You said that dissection was time sensitive."

"It was," he said. "Half an hour ago, before you started being mad."

"Give me my cane."

Tom went over to one of the tables and brought back a stack of her papers, instead. He dropped them in front of her. It was clear how much she wanted him to have grabbed the wrong ones: equally clear he hadn't. He leaned against the desk and crossed his arms, cane still in one hand.

"When you drink coffee," Tom said. "It's generally mine, and it's terrible, because you've never liked it enough to learn to brew it properly. You just want the caffeine in it, and you load it up with every adulterating nonsense possible to make it drinkable."

"What are you getting at. Give me my cane, you–"

Tom handed it over, and jerked his leg out of the way as she immediately tried to smack him in the shin with it. She scowled at the empty space where he ought to have been.

"This little dance we do," Tom said. "It's better than a year of smacking each other with bo staffs. If you're compatible with anyone, it's with me."

"You hate me," Hermione said blankly.

"Don't be an idiot."

"Pilots do not talk to each other that way!"

"Your Potter and Weasley mostly grunt at each other, I know, but they are not every pilot in the world."

Hermione pointed her cane at him. "You can't badmouth my best friends and expect to get inside my head."

Tom rolled his eyes. "You can't be _that_ scared of having me in there, Hermione."

As manipulation it was as subtle as Acromantula kicking the Sydney Opera House into splinters, and equally inescapable. There was some kind of terrible brain disease afflicting every surviving refugee from the Gryffindor Shatterdome that made them incapable of virtues like "reasonable caution", much less anything that smelled of cowardice.

"Fine," Hermione snarled. Tom smiled. "Get a chair and stop looming. We need to plan."


	2. Chapter 2, Setting Up the Dominoes

Author's note: Thanks for your nice words! capctr, this is a mundane AU, yes.

* * *

Every Shatterdome developed something of its own character. The personalities inside, the culture outside, how many kaiju they stopped or failed to, the temper of the leading Marshal and the star pilots. Here at the end of the world Beauxbatons mechanics worked cheek by jowl with Durmstrang supply officers with Eaglecrest cooks with Uagadou medics, but four Shatterdomes had contributed the majority of the staff. Doomed Gryffindor, which had been full of heroes, the Ravenclaw geniuses, Hufflepuff that had become a byword for sheer bloodyminded persistence- _we'll be working like Hufflepuffs to get these repairs done_ -

And Slytherin, which had been full of fucking arseholes. Fucking arseholes like Tom Riddle.

"This is ridiculous," Ron said. "You can't-why can't one of us do it?"

Hermione looked up from her dinner and rattled off a string of numbers. And Greek letters, and at least one symbol and capital letter, and what might have been an order for lamb vindaloo with extra poppadoms.

"Did you get all that?" she said, at the end.

"We can learn," Harry said, grimly.

"Can you learn in the next week?" Hermione said, and silence took them all.

"At least-" Ron swallowed, and went on, pleading. "At least take one of us. Not him. Hermione, he's not-"

For once she didn't puff up and ask him not _what_ , Ronald, what ridiculous prejudice against the Slytherin dome was about to come out of his mouth, and the lack of it made him know just how bad it was.

"I know," Hermione said. "But it has to be me, and he..."

He, him, that one-people were a little strange about saying Riddle's name. It was just that he always seemed to hear anything you said after it, and three weeks later you were waking up mysteriously reassigned to the worst jobs in the dome, and you hadn't even known that trainee innocently tightening bolts behind you when you said he was a dick had a sister from Slytherin.

Hermione speared a carrot. "We've spent months living in each other's pockets," she said. "He'll help me with Dumbledore, all the engineers owe him something or other, and he's-" She stuffed the carrot in her mouth and mumbled, uncharacteristically.

"We like your egg too, Hermione," Harry said.

She swallowed. "He's used to my leg," she said, and Ron tried not to wince. "He knows what I can do and can't better than the medics, even."

The next time either of them apologized for not rescuing her before the roof fell in, she was going to beat them senseless with her cane, and then she would need a new cane, Hermione had said. Because their skulls were so thick, Hermione had explained. There was nothing to be done and their pity was suffocating and she got around fine, Hermione had explained.

Harry ran his hands through his hair. Ron stared at his plate.

"I hate this," Harry said.

"There has to be another way," Ron said.

Hermione slapped the table, making them both grab for their drinks.

"There _isn't_ ," she said flatly. "There is no other way. We are out of time, and this is the _only_ -the only-" Her voice cracked.

Ron dropped his milk and grabbed her hand. "Hermione," he said. He squeezed. "You know we're behind you. You know, right?"

She gave him a watery smile.

"We know you're the genius," Harry said.

"He's just _such_ a prick," Ron said, as if that was the only reason to keep someone he considered his second sister out of a jaeger, and Hermione gave a wet, sniffing little laugh, as he'd meant her to.

"He really is, isn't he," she said.

Silence fell again.

"Er," Ron said, eventually. "I actually had some bad news too, before you had to show off yours."

"My news is potentially world-saving, Ronald."

"You have to get in Riddle's head, though," Harry said. "You'll probably catch something."

"Catch," Hermione said. "Something."

"You'll come out of Drift hangover and stab us both," Ron said, mournfully.

"I hardly need to Drift for that."

"Or worse, you'll beat me at chess," Ron said.

Hermione's eyes were drier now. "Please just tell us your news, you... _You._ "

"Ginny's coming for a visit," Ron said.

"A visit?" Hermione said. "Isn't that a little... dangerous?"

Their plates were almost empty now, but they lingered over the last few bites. Meals were the only place their schedules overlapped these days. Harry and Ron did their best to drag her out of the lab for some recreation or sunshine or something every few days, but time was slipping away as the kaiju came closer and closer.

"Of course, but try telling her something is okay for me but not for her," Ron said gloomily.

"Alone?" Hermione said, and immediately corrected herself. "No, of course not, she must be coming in with Charlie, right?"

Ron, mouth full, made the gesture that sparring pilots used to acknowledge their opponent had scored a touch. When he'd swallowed, he said, "She's been working with him. They're bringing the new shipment in Thursday."

"I can't believe your mum let her," Harry said.

"No," Ron disagreed. "No, you only knew her when she had that crush on you, mate, the real Ginny's a terror, I'm only surprised it took so long."

Hermione chased a noodle around the bottom of her tray with her fork and let them chat back and forth over her head. "Tell Harry and Ron" was one obstacle off her list.

Unfortunately, that brought her one step closer to everything else on her list.

* * *

Tom took a walk.

In one of the bays, Clean Sweep was being dismantled for parts. Most of the same team who had worked on her currently worked on Nimbus 2000, and they were sure they could use some of Clean Sweep's parts for patches and upgrades.

Tom stopped by a stranded turbine and craned his neck upwards. The simulations he'd trained on had been Mach I's like this. He didn't know Clean Sweep, with its garish yellow paint and battered chassis, but hours of simulations had left something in him that stirred when he was near the jaegers, especially these older ones. A phantom weight on his arms, pressure on his skull where the helmet ought to sit.

"I need Abraxas," Tom said, when a mechanic came around the corner and spotted him. She nodded and sped off.

The Malfoys had donated enough to the jaeger program that Abraxas would have been prince of Slytherin Dome, even without the finest engineering education and internships money could buy. Here he was still minor royalty, and thus could not be seen rushing to Tom's call. Still, he wasn't stupid, and it wasn't long before he so-casually ambled Tom's way.

A handsome man, even in his coveralls, hair crushed and sweaty from a hardhat quickly pulled off. If you knew the Malfoys, and Tom had that displeasure, Abraxas looked very much like the first and most well-formed of a production run on blond snobs, the one against which all other Malfoys would be compared and found progressively more weak-chinned and balding.

"Riddle!" he cried. "I thought you'd died down there, it's been ages."

"Sorry to disappoint," Tom said. "Take a walk with me, I'm sure you could use a break."

"Too right... let's walk by Firebolt," he suggested. "There shouldn't be much going on there just now."

Abraxas fell in beside him. They were of a height, and their strides had matched easily, back in Slytherin. Now it took a moment for Tom to relax back into long, ground-eating steps.

"Is Clean Sweep's drifting rig operational?" Tom said, when they were out of the halo of noise surrounding Clean Sweep.

In the corner of his eye, Abraxas's whole body tensed. "Riddle..."

"Is it," Tom said. "Operational?"

"It should be," he said.

"Good," Tom said. "I want it."

"You-" Abraxas stopped. Tom kept going, and Abraxas hurried to catch up.

"Something to say?"

Abraxas was visibly torn, visibly trying to sweep what he was about to say for mines. He tilted his head back, dropped it again, looked down at his hands.

"Last time," he managed. "The last time you-"

"The last time _we_ ," Tom said.

"It went... badly, Riddle," he got out.

Tom laughed. The noise bounced off the machines around them, echoed in the empty spaces of the bay. "'Badly,'" he said. "You have a poet's soul, Abraxas."

" _Tom_ -" His voice was wretched.

There was some satisfaction in being the only person who saw the Malfoy scion this way, sweating and uncertain. And there was so little pleasure to be had these days.

But crumble the ground under someone too often and it stopped paying dividends. Tom relented. "Keep your girdle on, Abraxas," he said. "It's for Hermione. You can get her that rig faster than a requisition form."

They drew level with one of Firebolt's feet. Red, and gold, and hideous, in Tom's opinion.

It had been a long time since he'd considered what he'd want a jaeger to look like.

"Hermione," Abraxas said, slowly. Plainly and desperately, he wanted to believe that, so Tom gave him more.

"The short wobbly one who works with me," Tom said. "Hermione. She wants one, and I can get her one. Can't I, Abraxas."

"Of course," he said. The tension in him was dripping away. "Yes. Hermione. For an experiment, I expect."

"I imagine," Tom agreed. "Get it to the lab within the next few days."

"Hermione," Abraxas said again. "Nothing to do with you at all."

"I'm a biologist, Abraxas, what would I want with drift rig? Unless they run on livers these days."

"Right. Of course." He scrubbed his face with his hand. "We'll get it to you in a day or two."

Tom made a "hmm" noise and changed the subject, easing up the pull in Abraxas's leash. "What a hideous jaeger," he remarked.

"Gryffindors," Abraxas said, automatically, easily. "If it can't be red and gold, why even bother?"

* * *

Eventually the meal couldn't be stretched any more. Ron went off to the gym. Harry said he'd catch up, and lingered with Hermione, walking by her as she started towards the other set of doors.

"Hermione," he said. "You know-the rumors-"

There was too long a pause, and Hermione didn't look at him when she said, "I don't put stock in gossip."

"And you're certain you're right and you won't listen to anything I say, I know," Harry said. "But if they're true. If you find something in his head."

Hermione's lips were a firm line, and she stepped a little faster.

"You can come to us," he said quietly. "I won't say-well, Ron will say he told you so. But we'll always believe you. We'll back you against anyone. Screw the Malfoys and the Parkinsons and that Umbridge cow, alright?"

"None of this is _important_ ," Hermione snapped. "This is what I have to do, and I won't let petty rivalry and gossip and _ridiculous_ rumors-" Her voice had been raising, and people were sending sidelong glances their way. Hermione stopped talking, and started again, quieter.

"I'm sorry," she said. "It's just. This is hard enough. Thank you. But I have to believe he's innocent if we're ever going to Drift."  
They were nearly to the labs now.

"Would you try with someone else?" Harry said. "If we found someone, would you try?"

Hermione wet her lips, then nodded. "I'd try. But-you would have to find them. I can't leave the lab, there's still so much to do..."

"There's a thousand people in this dome," Harry said. "We'll find someone." He squeezed her shoulder, and let go.

"There are not a-oh, go catch up with Ron," Hermione said. She pushed open the lab doors.

"See you at dinner," Harry said. Hermione made a noncommittal noise, eyes already glazing over with the things she needed to do. He continued, pointedly, "and yes, that is a threat, we will drag you out of here."

"Go," Hermione said. "Before I set my oh-so-scary lab partner on you."

She shut the door in his face. Harry left, mind already ticking through candidates.


End file.
